William Muir (1902-1964) was a sculptor and watercolorist who, along with his wife Emily Muir, traveled the world on art assignments before settling in Stonington, Maine for the bulk of his life.  He was born in North Dakota and studied at the Minneapolis School of Art before moving to New York City to accept a fellowship to study at the Art Students League in the mid-1920s.  It was there that he met his future wife, Emily, whom he wed in 1928.  Best known as a sculptor, his vigorously organic work was done in a variety of woods and, later, granite.  Seed pods, blossoms, fishbones, moss, leaves and lichens yielded their biological forms for his extrapolation into even more expressively botanical permutations.  He executed these lively objects after preliminary drawings based on the original forms and, as an article in Time Magazine of 1964 opined, “nature, with all her wisdom, cannot seem to match by accident what Muir shapes by design. . . .  Muir’s subtly swiveling works exchange contours with the space that surrounds them, earning comparisons with the smooth biomorphic bulges that mark the sculpture of Arp, Moore, and Brancusi.”  (Time, March 13, 1964) 

Both Bill and Emily drew extensively in charcoal and graphite, and painted in watercolors – sometimes in such a stylistic symbiosis that it is difficult to discern which of them actually executed some of their unsigned works.  This befits the loving relationship that seemed to follow all of their days together.  And while some of the work remained unsigned, there is a large portion of their drawings and paintings and sculptures, with signatures, that still exists, and it is our pleasure to be able to offer it to interested collectors.